Introduction to Containers

Course Conclusion

Description

Containers are a bit of an “it” thing in technology right now. The reason for this is simple: they’re a very powerful tool which can streamline your development and ops processes, save companies money, and make life for developers much easier. However, the flip side of this is that they’re a new paradigm to understand, and require that apps be built with a specific architecture to take full advantage of their features. In this course written and presented by Adrian Ryan, you'll learn what containers are, the benefits of using them, and how to containerize an app. Let's get started!

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Introduction to Containers course from Cloud Academy. This course is for anyone who works in technology and has heard of containers, but doesn't really know what they are. Whether you're a business manager, a product manager, or even a junior dev, you should be able to take away a basic understanding of what containers are, different ways to use them, and why you'd want to. We're assuming some basic level of business technology literacy, and as long as you know what a server, virtual machine, and Linux distro are, you should be good to go.

If you're more of an advanced developer or CIS admin, this course might be a bit too simple for you, even if you don't know much about containers. You can try moving directly to the why use containers lesson here, then moving directly on to our course called The Fundamentals of Containers. First, a little bit about myself.

My name is Adrian Ryan and I'm an educator and a product manager. I got my start in the New York City tech scene as the second employee at an eduction startup called General Assembly, where I built a number of our courses. And I've also started an ed tech startup where I was the head of product. Docker was actually one of our clients there, so I've more than a little experience both using and teaching about containers.

This course has three main lessons, along with this intro and a quick recap at the end. The first is what are containers? And will give you a high level overview of what containers are and how they work. We won't be getting too deep into the technical implementation, just hitting the major points and contrasting containers against other similar technologies, like virtual machines.

The second lesson is why use containers? And there we will go over the major use cases of containers. We'll talk about how they can make development and testing easier, how they can be deployed in a CI/CD workflow, and how to use containers in production.

The final lesson is a brief overview of containerizing an app. Here we'll go over the architectural elements of how to use containers in the real world, including some of the core concepts of this architecture, such as immutability and microservices, and also what can and can't be containerized safely. And of course, we'll wrap up with a quick overview of what we've learned and where to go next to continue learning at the end. So let's begin. Click on the next button and we'll get started.

About the Author

Adrian M Ryan is an educator and product manager. He was an early employee at General Assembly, has co-founded an education startup and a consultancy, and he loves teaching. He grew up in rural Alaska, and while he now lives in New York City he makes sure to find time to get out in the woods hiking whenever possible.